RE: RE: RE: RE: Mackenzie Valley Review Board

With all due respect, look at Zimbabwe and South Africa. Total disasters and a disater developing. You don't own History, or Progress.

How about wealth creation, capitalism, and economic growth for everyone. " Eskimos " have benefited from the white mans intrusion into their world for a long time; maybe if diamonds were valuable during the 1200's AD, Gengus Khan would have not treated you so well; dental care would have been pulling your teeth out and piling them into a giant Mongolian totem pole.

History has never stood still for the rights of the complainers to remain primative. It'is not the white devils fault that the world is screwed up; it is the 'Luddites' fault. Give me back your snow machines, your helicopter rescues, your health and welfare entitlements, and your mosquito repelant, and thank me. I'll give you your diamonds. Just don't re-negociate the deal later on with another giant stock hustle.

<<Those remarks can put project on the shelf for a while>>

Are you saying my remarks are threatening to put your world into a MPV shutdown ? Give me a break, Kimosabe. How many fish have you caught at Kennedy Lake ? Listen up Tonto:

The West is signing its own death sentence

How on earth did we get here? As every sane political leader knows by now, this is not just a temporary emergency created by a bizarre fit of reckless lending: the crash of 2008 simply blew the lid off the real scandal of western economic governance. Having won the Cold War and succeeded in settling the great ideological argument of the 20th century in favour of free-market economics, the nations of the West managed to bankrupt themselves by insisting that they could fund a lukewarm form of socialism with the proceeds of capitalism.

What the West took from its defeat of the East was that it must accept the model of the state as social engineer in order to avert any future threat to freedom. Capitalism would only be tolerated if government distributed its wealth evenly across society. The original concept of social security and welfare provision – that no one should be allowed to sink into destitution or real want – had to be revisited. The new ideal was that there should not be inequalities of wealth. The roaring success of the free market created such unprecedented levels of mass prosperity that absolute poverty became virtually extinct in western democracies, so it had to be replaced as a social evil by “relative poverty”. It was not enough that no one should be genuinely poor (hungry and without basic necessities): what was demanded now was that no one should be much worse (or better) off than anyone else. The job of government was to create a society in which there were no significant disparities in earnings or standards of living. So it was not just the unemployed who were given assistance: the low paid had their wages supplemented by working tax credits and in-work benefits so that their earnings could be brought up to the arbitrary level which the state had decided constituted not-poverty.

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This picture of the perfect society – in which disparities of wealth are eradicated and economic equality is maintained through a vastly complex and expensive system of state intervention – has been the explicit goal of the EU virtually since its inception. It had an on-again, off-again history in Britain until it was locked firmly into the political infrastructure by Gordon Brown. More unexpectedly, it has now taken root in the American political culture, where Mr Obama seems determined to exploit it in his blood-curdling contest with the Republicans. Once ensconced, this concept undermines the logic of the free-market economy which funds it.

Capitalism is, by its nature, dynamic: it creates transitory disparities of wealth constantly as it reinvents itself. Fortunes are made and lost and, as old industries are replaced by new, the earnings that they create rise and fall. Punishing those who exceed some momentary average income and artificially subsidising those who fall below it – as well as providing for a universal standard of living which bears no relation to merit or even to need – has now reached the unavoidable, unaffordable end of the line.

So who will tell the truth – and then act on it? Who will say not just that welfare must be cut, but that in future the NHS will need to rely on a system of co-payments? That people will have to provide for their own retirement because the state pension will be frozen? That without a radical reduction in government intervention, the free and prosperous West will have been a brief historical aberration?